The claims of near term extinction for mankind are getting stronger and stronger as new scientific evidence is released. Sometime before the end of this century, we’ll all be toast, so any measures we take now at “building resilience” will only be short-lived exercises in self-preservation. That’s how short-sighted we humans are: no consideration for the children and future generations. As long as we can stay comfortably cocooned within the wasteful amenities and faux culture distractions of industrial civilization, we’ll keep sucking on the great ‘carbon energy’ cigar to keep the illusion going, despite the fact that we’re committing species suicide. We are like the domesticated animal that can no longer survive in the natural world. Our addiction to fossil fuels has literally become an ingrained trait, selectively advantageous in the short-term but ultimately leading to our own evolutionary dead end.

If you missed it, the latest news is that, contrary to the propaganda put out by climate change deniers, the Antarctic is not gaining ice, but losing ice:

This is not good news. A new international study—done by 47 experts using data from multiple satellites and aircraft—shows that the Earth is losing ice at an ever-increasing rate from both poles. We’ve known for years that the Arctic has been suffering massive ice loss, with the record low broken more than once in recent years. What’s devastating about this new report is that it shows unequivocally and quantitatively that the Antarctic is also losing land ice, with the critical West Antarctica ice sheet losing on average 65 billion tons of ice every year.

Measuring ice is difficult to do and uncertainties are generally pretty big. By combining several different methods from several different sources, the scientists were able to get the best, most accurate measurements ever made. These new data show that the ice loss from both poles has increased by a factor of three since the 1990s. Just Greenland—the largest source of fresh water ice in the Northern Hemisphere—is losing ice at a rate five times what it did just in the 1990s: about 142 billion tons per year.

Together, since 1992, this ice melt has added over a centimeter (about a half inch) to sea level rise. That may not sound like much, but it doesn’t take much rise in sea levels to start causing catastrophic changes in erosion, storms, and flooding. Worse, this accounts for only about one-fifth of the total amount of sea level rise. Much of the rise is due to the water in the oceans expanding due to warming and other sources.

There’s a double whammy for you: Global warming is increasing the amount of water in the oceans from melting ice, and also increasing the sea level rise by heating up the water itself…

…This new study wipes out yet another false claim from climate change deniers, too. A common refrain from them is that Antarctic ice is increasing, not decreasing. However, this is not true for two reasons. The first is that they count sea ice in that measure. However, Antarctic sea ice tends to melt away completely every year in the spring and summer, and then it reforms in the winter. It therefore on average does not contribute to sea level rise or to the heat budget of the Earth. Second, this new study shows the claim is wrong anyway. We are losing ice from Antarctica every year, and it’s the critical land ice…

I’m sorry to say this, but all the ghastly visions of runaway climate change may very well come to fruition, wiping any trace of humans off the face of the Earth. In the end, man wasn’t really any different from lowly bacteria overwhelming the confines of a petri dish and extinguishing themselves. I’m sure we’ll have amassed an amazing trove of video, literature and other media documenting the horrors to come so that when some alien race visits the planet in the future, they will be able to watch bemused at how humans killed themselves off in the name of “progress” and a dollar.

Michael Sandmel:
“We make up half the world’s population, and frankly, we’re being screwed. We’re being denied a future by a lack of ambition, a lack of vision, and governments that are far too beholden to the interests of big fossil fuel companies, big coal companies, the banks that fund them.”

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About xraymike79

I'm a social critic, political/cultural commentator and artist. The modern industrial world is on the cusp of great changes to our current unsustainable way of life. Most people are oblivious to the paradigm shift that will occur, but some are starting to awaken to the fact that the future will not resemble the halcyon days of the last half century in America as evidenced by the OWS movement. My objective is to highlight important news stories and find the truth that is hidden behind what Joe Bageant called the American Hologram.
www.collapseofindustrialcivilization.com

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4 thoughts on “Burning the Candle at Both Ends”

“That’s how short-sighted we humans are: no consideration for the children and future generations”
Nope….oh you mean modern industrial “civilised” humans, aka homo colossus aka home economicus! Yep….!!

Remnant (indigenous) homo sapiens have known for some time that we “civilised” are crazy and they have been warning about our diseased state (wetiko)…

One of the great myths of civilization is that hunter-gatherers in the path of empire purposely and happily joined the empire culture when given a chance.
The truth is that this almost never happened. They were enslaved, or their natural resources were taken or destroyed so they could not continue their culture, or they were killed or threatened with annihilation. But they desperately did not want to join the spreading militarized agricultural or industrial culture.

Amen to that:I have spent the past eight years figuring out what to keep & what to toss: knowing how to do X is more important than having a gadget to do X

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